David Hughes is the Daily Telegraph's chief leader writer. He has been covering British politics for 30 years.

Gordon Brown is heading for victory in 2015

Could Gordon Brown be gradually morphing from a hate figure into a sympathy figure? For 18 months the Prime Minister has attracted the kind of tintack-spitting loathing that Tony Blair never really generated even though he led this country into a war on the basis of a lie.

There's just something about Brown that seems to set people's teeth on edge – that, and the fact as Chancellor he helped steer us not into war but into recession, an altogether more wicked thing to do.

Yet as blow follows blow – the latest is today's Guardian/ICM poll showing voters, by a two to one majority, think Labour would do better at the next election with someone else at the tiller – he limps doggedly on.

There is a certain grandeur about this. What keeps him going? Few Brown observers would have expected him to throw in the towel – he is not a quitter – but many would have expected to see him blow a gasket or two before now. But he's still upright, trudging towards a now-inevitable electoral humiliation.

Perhaps it's dawned on the Prime Minister that the greatest service he can now do for his party is to lead it to defeat in the summer of next year.

Just as the Tories should have lost the 1992 election – they would have been out for five years and back with a landslide after a Neil Kinnock premiership – so Labour really needs to lose in 2010.

The next government is going to have to pour some very bitter medicine down the nation's neck. There will be tax rises and ferocious spending cuts and, as a consequence, strikes and unrest. This week's warning by the police of a summer of discontent rather misses the point. The demos will only come when the public sector unions feel the pain and as Brown has made clear there will be no spending cuts before the election, the pain will be deferred.

So it will be the Tories who have to clear up the mess and that will not offer a solid platform for a winning a second term. Brown has always taken the long view in politics and victory for Labour in 2015 is obviously what's keeping him going.